Microsoft Cognitive Services enables developers to create the next generation of applications that can see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret needs using natural methods of communication. We have made adding intelligent features to your platforms easier.

Face API detects human faces and compares similar ones, organizes people into groups according to visual similarity, and identifies previously tagged people and their emotions in images.

Computer Vision API gives you the tools to understand the contents of any image. It creates tags that identify objects, beings like celebrities, or actions in an image, and crafts coherent sentences to describe it. You can now detect landmarks and handwriting in images. Handwriting detection remains in preview.

Content Moderator provides machine assisted moderation of text and images, augmented with human review tools. Video moderation is available in preview as part of Azure Media Services.

Let’s take a closer look at what these APIs can do for you.

Anna is presenting us the latest updates of Cognitive Services.

Bring vision to your app

Previously, users of Face API could obtain attributes such as age, gender, facial points, and headpose. Now, it’s also possible to obtain emotions in the same Face API call. This responds to some user scenarios in which both age and emotions were requested simultaneously. Learn more about Face API in our guides.

Recognizing handwriting

Handwriting OCR is also available in preview in Computer Vision API. This feature detects text in a handwritten image and extracts the recognized characters into a machine-usable character stream. It detects and extracts handwritten text from notes, letters, essays, whiteboards, forms, etc. It works with different surfaces and backgrounds such as white paper, sticky notes, and whiteboards. No need to transcribe those handwritten notes anymore; you can snap an image instead and use Handwriting OCR to digitize your notes, saving time, effort, and paper clutter. You can even decide to do a quick search when you want to pull the notes up again.